Our 1982–83 sabbatical in Zürich was a pivotal year in my scientific career. While visiting Israel and Germany on a lecture tour in spring 1983, I learned about the El Niño warming event of the century in the tropical Pacific OceanAnomalous ocean temperatures in tropical Pacific Ocean. This natural climatic event really caught my attention as it had significant impacts on fisheries in the eastern Pacific and strongly affected the weather in North America and beyond, even in the Middle East. When I returned to UBC after my sabbatical, I started a research project on fish-climate interactions involving the Fraser RiverFraser river Sockeye salmon migration. This in turn inspired me to search for a new position where I could focus on climate research, which was not being supported by UBC. In the summer of 1985, I was offered a professorship atProfessorship at McGill UniversityMcGill University to focus on climate research, and in August 1986, we moved to MontrealMontreal West where my academic homeHome was in the Department of Meteorology (now named Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences). In a few years, I became the founding director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Climate and GlobalCentre for Climate and Global Change Research (McGill University) Change Research (C2GCR), which brought together faculty and graduate students from several departments at McGill.